Reproductive Rights: The Stuff That Got Left Out In School

This year in school, I’m taking an elective called Gender, Culture, Power (pretty badass, right?). We’ve covered all kinds of feminist topics from gender stereotypes to domestic violence to sex trafficking to reading about rape as a war crime in the Lynn Nottage play Ruined. It’s been a pretty enlightening experience, but when the time to choose our final projects rolled around, I knew what had been missing from the course and what I was eager to look into further: reproductive rights.

Knowing about our bodies should be such a basic thing — something our parents, schools and even the government should make sure that teens are well informed about. And yet today we are not only ignorant in many ways about our bodies, but we seriously take our …